Les Fleurs Du Mal, Paper Bombs

The five New York artists in this all-woman show  on display, coincidentally, down the hill from the WACK! show at the MOCA Geffen  display only the most oblique feminist sensibilities. Perhaps Ginna Tripletts dense webs of comic-bookish girl-heroes  Wonder Woman, Wonderlands Alice  count as neo-gynocentric, or Gina Magids bird-of-prey imagery manifests the free spirit that 70s feminists sought. But the expansive power of the work makes its own point. Anke Weyer and Ieva Mediodia, both northern European, explode across their canvases: Weyer in a dark, gestural, neo-abstract-expressionist fashion, Mediodia in a more linear but no less cataclysmic manner that mediates between Weyers girls-go-neue-Wilde and the cartographic vortices of fellow Gotham-based foreigner Julie Mehretu. The shows one sculptor is Debora Warner, whose immense black rose sprawls across much of the floor.

Another downtown grouping charged with an unusual energy level, Paper Bombs, relies, as its name implies, on drawing  and everything else you can do with and to paper. Standouts among the more than 20 locals who harness this deceptively manipulable material include Jen Lius immensely scaled psychedelic blowout; Julie Kirkpatricks much more intimately scaled mixed mandalas; the exacting and weirdly corny portraits of aviatrix sisters by Mario Correa; Eli Langers incised, rough-textured black-on-black geometries; Dennis Hollingsworths descending, oozing blobs on vertically stacked sheets; the elegant perspectival loops (rather like freeway ramps) of Daniel Adams; day-glo cutouts Mary Kidd shows on the floor; Mary OMalleys intricate, hallucinatory hyperdoodles; and the little grisaille explosions of Jonathan Thomas.